Fidel Castro: "The Cuban Model No Longer Works"

I never said Fidel's Marxist-Leninist economy was a resounding success. Yet understand; being poor is relative. Dirt poor Indigenous people have survived for 10 thousand years and they have fat happy children, albeit without 'clothes'. Of course, the Emperor Bush destroys the global economy and he's better? No shame in being poor. The shame is being stupid, and you don't survive for "thousands of years" being stupid.

Fidel Castro was wrong all along. Fidel's experiment with Marxist-Leninist political economy has been a total failure. His model doest work if you want your nation to be a third world dirt poor dictatorship, like Castro turned his country into.

Many old tired things are crumbling, my friend, or have you not been paying attention to what is happening in the world?

Fidel has serve his purpose, and he has served it well. Now we will see what results have been. Again, I say to you; "Look at the average Cubano after Fidel and look at the average American after 10 different US presidents.

Did you know; The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years.
Do you think Americans have not felt the boot of capitalist hegemony? Do you think Cubans would stand for this without Fidel?

Not to worry. There is much life to Cuba after Fidel and there will be more, but we will see if the Cuban people will replace Fidel with the same kind of people running the USA. That would be the tragedy, because the region does not need another Haiti.

Castros regime has been a complete and absolute failure. The rest of the leadership no longer believe in the regime, they are just puppets obeying order from the Castro brothers. They keep the regime alive by use of force and repression, but the day of reckoning is upon them, the regime is coming apart at the seams.

Not to worry; the 'comrades' on Wall Street and the 'comrades' in Beijing have already decided your fate.

Your capitalist masters have no trouble with the communist agenda of the Chinese politburo, so why should they have a problem with Castro? So sad that he's not dead so they could destabilize the island, but why not Fidel after dealing with so many other worse creatures, like the Zionists in Israel today.

So sorry to inform you that its never about the politics and 'always' about the money. Cheap educated Cuban labor will overcome the ideological nonsense. What do the Americans want? Cheap labor and open markets. Everything else is entertainment for the masses. What do Cubans want? Higher standard of living and personal freedom.

Give the Americans their cheap labor, and give the Cubans a higher standard of living; its a deal. Mutual needs bring together strange bedfellows, and it is still possible that Cuba will become the Japan of the western hemisphere.

Fidel Castro has ruined the island. His selfish desire to dominate the Cuban people, has not allow them to prosper and fulfill their potential. The daily struggle that most Cubans have to go through just to live their daily lives is unbelievable. Tourists go to Cuba and relax in the hotels, enjoy the beaches and eat the good food. These are things that the average Cuban can’t afford. Instead of releasing the grip over the people and allow their entrepreneurial abilities to create new ideas and value for others, Castro prefer to keep them under his control, unable to sustain themselves, and hold on to power.

The Castros regime has been a complete and absolute failure. The rest of the leadership no longer believe in the regime, they are just puppets obeying order from the Castro brothers. They keep the regime alive by use of force and repression, but the day of reckoning is upon them, the regime is coming apart at the seams.

Really enjoying the results of the Brazilian election...a female and a Socialist! The largest 'democracy' in Latin America, led by a woman on a long-ago 'terrorist list'.

Did you know Moses was a terrorist? You really never considered how terrified Pharaoh was before he let the Jews go? Of course, you know Ghandhi and Mandela were also on US terrorist lists(shhhh...nobody knows about Ghandhi). Cuba is still listed as a terrorist state, although the only ones they terrorize are some old Cubans in Miami who are still looking for their cut of the revolution. Anyone else?

Wanna know why Americans can't do math? Because when the body count reaches 5,000 they stop counting. It does them no good, so they're trained to ignore the numbers and concentrate on the flag.....keep concentrating...no,no,no, bad numbers. Math is hard!

More Americans die every year from lack of health care than escape or try to escape from Cuba. Cuba is a hard life, but everyone knows how to count. Now, the American capitalist appetite is for 'low-cost' educated workers, because these people in America are too expensive. You already know that American politicians are never responsible for counting; bodies, money, or anything else. However many the number is, the other guy did it!

Strangely, Fidel doesn't have that problem...everything wrong in Cuba is Fidel's fault...no excuses, no pointing the finger, no hiding the truth...why do you think Cubans 'know' they are miserable? Hopefully, when Fidel is gone, and the bright lights come to Cuba, and the capitalists take what is best...the Cuban people will remember who taught them to count...and a Cuban woman will lead Cuba!

How many Cubans in the past 51 years have suffered unspeakable misery for saying the same thing Fidel Castro just said? Cubans are willing to risk their lives sailing in makeshift rafts in order to escape from Dr. Castro island paradise. He has expended Cuba’s resources exporting revolution around the world. The only ones who believe this consummate liar are brainwashed sympathizers and die-hard progressives. Who the cap fits let them wear it.

Statism versus free markets is about as easy to understand as the difference between Singapore and Greece, and yet here we go again. This weird suicidal statist impulse seems for Obama to trump almost every other consideration: All this goes on as Obama sees the EU running away from precisely what he wishes to implement, while at home a high-tax, high-entitlement, redistributive economy like California has managed to destroy the most richly endowed human and natural landscape — agriculture, tourism, high-tech, oil and gas, Hollywood, Napa Valley, Silicon Valley — in the nation. And yet here we continue down into the abyss while finishing a second year of absorbing banks, insurance companies, auto manufacturers, and the health care system, borrowing trillions to redistribute in new entitlements, with more lust for equality of ends notions like cap and trade and immigration amnesty.

Everywhere one looks statism is a failure. Contrast resource-rich Venezuela with Chile. Juxtapose Cuba to Colombia. Of course, compare Dark Age North Korea with the 21st-century South. Look at the UK in 1954 and 1990.

They are rioting in Europe not to embrace socialism, but in petulant fashion to find someone somehow to pay for it — as if “they” and “them” are partying in some remote Aegean island, with vaults of stashed euros.

Whether hard communism or soft socialism, statism does not work. We all know why — it goes against human nature, rewarding mediocrity and punishing merit, professing egalitarianism for the masses, while the operators of the system, whether the old Soviet apparatchiks or the new crony EU Brussels bureaucrats, satisfy their appetites like capitalists.

How can the Democratic Party become run by those who live lives nothing remotely similar to what they profess when today's chasm between word and deed is stunning — and never remarked on. Stranger still is this new Democratic emperor/bread-and-circus alliance. The very wealthy promise largess to the poorer on the premise that both despise the culture of the aspiring, the one in condescending disdain, the other in bitter envy.

The final irony? ~ How quietly and without audit America’s moneyed and cognitive elites became such hectoring populists — with the constant assumption they can still live, school, work, and marry largely among like kind — oh so distant from the objects of their concern.

excerpted from: http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/from-the-unbelievable-to-the-passe/?si...

As one who had a father who attained the age of 100+ years, with all his mental faculties, I am unpersuaded by the lapse in speech becoming the measure of understanding. Perhaps we have the very reason for Mr . Obama's overt affair with his teleprompter. After 50 years of trying to discredit Fidel perhaps they will succeed this time, but when I count the times he has been declared on thing or another, dead at times....I no longer have much interest in how the press characterizes his meaning from one sentence, a paragraph, or even a book...because his is a life, a revolutionary life, a Cuban life. Not a life of Faux colonialism, neo Americanism, or abject Stalinism.

50 years the Cuban people have suffered; beans, bread, and few amenities. No McDonalds, Walmarts, or SUV's....simply Cuban; everyone suffered. To be Cuban and to suffer was sysnonymous, unlike Haiti where suffering is manufactured, and poverty is a cash crop. I think I once saw Fidel in a classic business suit, very dignified but clearly uncomfortable.

Maybe the Cuban people will turn wholeheartedly to Capitalism. China seems to have maintained its Communist principles and maneuvered itself into the Capitalist version of Disneyland, and with so many Mexican 'issues' the Cuban beaches look enticing. Cubans deserve the opportunity to ease their suffering, but as capitalism takes hold and reserves for itself the best that Cuba can produce, there will be many who are not so eager to give up the benefits of Socialism and they will remember Fidel....

I expect disagreement with this view, so let's make the disagreement on a level playing field; look at the parameters for 'the average American child' and look at the same parameters for the 'average Cuban child', and other than monetary value, and even there, because the American child is 'born into a massive debt' that is even extended to their children. The American child is inheriting a political system that has dismissed the compromise of political discourse, and a financial system that would just as likely hire you into servitude as to throw you from your home. Poverty and illiteracy are growing in America! The American 'prison industry' is now just another capitalist investment with a steady influx of 'paying' customers. Propaganda never did impress me...what impresses me is the number of Socialists, once called Terrorists who are successfully leading in Latin America....most quite uncomfortable in a Saville Row suit.

How is possible that still are some who are sympathetic to the Tyrannosaurus Rex? Don’t let this psychopath liar fool you, he has no conscience.

Castro during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 12, 1962, the closest the world had ever come to nuclear war, wrote in his cable to Khrushchev in October 26, 1962, “that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through tan act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other… the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.”

Khrushchev response in October 30, 1962, “In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that would have led. Rather than a simple strike, it would have been the start of a thermonuclear world war.”

Castro, in his deep hatred against the United States, did not hesitate in asking for the launch of a nuclear strike without given a damn that such action sealed the annihilation of the Cuban people and a large part of humanity. Castro deserves everything that's coming to him.

As a long-time watcher, and admirer, of Fidel Castro, I must say that I find his words, once again, of extreme importance to the world.

I.e., when he says, “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”, it is an acknowledgement that the Cuban ‘revolutionary’ model does not work *anymore*, in the new world environment. It is simply an admission of fact that the world has changed, Cuba has changed, and Fidel has changed. What is so controversial about this ‘truth’? There can be no doubt that the revolutionary model was influenced by forces outside Cuba’s borders, both on the left and the right. There can be no doubt that the time has come for the revolutionary model to be retired, and in its place a “Cuban” model, that incorporates the aspirations of ‘all’ Cubans. What has been misinterpreted in these words is that the revolutionary model had, or has, no credible legitimacy. An unfortunate twist of the meaning and intent of Fidel’s words.

The people of Cuba have paid a very high price for ‘their’ revolution. It is a price that entails suffering and hardship, but it is also a price that produced a population literacy and life-expectancy equal if not exceeding that of the United States; the highest in Latin America. Prosperity is fleeting, as millions of Americans have come to realize, but the legitimacy of the socialist movement throughout Latin America is just becoming evident, as the Cuban model is shown to be ‘no longer’ relevant. That in no way is a admission of failure, it is simply the realization that the time for change has arrived. Although Fidel has denied repeatedly that Cuba does not export revolution, the present ascendancy of socialist governments throughout the region cannot be envisioned without the support of the Cuban revolution. It was to Fidel, and Cuba, that those who were called terrorists, looked to for support, and now are the leaders of progressive governments throughout the region.

These words are not to minimize the unfortunate communist aspects of the Cuban revolution. Neither are they an excuse for the inhumanity suffered by those who tried to subvert that revolution. ‘All’ are Cuban, ‘all’ are equally deserving of their Cuban heritage, and ‘all’ should be equally proud that the Cuban people have endured the longest revolution in the modern era. Fidel himself fully recognizes that he, who fathered that revolutionary model, is still relevant as the one who should lead in the dismantling of that model. Thank God, he still has the life and the ability to do so.

There are obviously a number of those who persist in believing in socialist utopian ideals. However on a practical level it should be understood that widely dispersed ownership and control of economic enterprise is a characteristic of "capitalist" enterprise, while the experiments in socialism have been characterized by centralized control.

The left right debate is useless at this stage. Instead there are some very specific administrative questions in connection primarily with the management of food water and energy.

The American corporatist model has been a failure and is in the process of deep reconsideration, by both recidivists and those with a more creative bent. Too many costs have been "externalized," such as air pollution and the negative health consequences of efficient but somewhat sinister agribusinesses. Nonetheless "private" control of economic enterprises has been more successful and much more democratic on average. Class mobility has been much more fluid in America than in places like Cuba or, of course, north Korea. The contrast is stark, and the conclusions by now should be very painfully obvious.

At this stage the whole world needs a comprehensive industrial policy. America and Cuba at this stage are in many ways at the precipice of the same problem. If you consider the word "sustainability" at a level deeper than sloganeering you'll begin to understand the technical and moral contours of the problem.

All economies are hybrids of dispersed ownership and private / governmental control. Cuba could have a better chance at achieving an efficient and adaptive solution because Cuba is nearly a clean slate. (There aren't too many industry associations or lobbyists there trying to protect vested interests like coal and agribusiness.). Also, in the beginning, small amounts of investment should generate stunning returns. Then, early success could build a virtuous momentum.

Cuba would likely be a great opportunity for "utopians" with a combination of practical skills and a vital sense of social purpose and justice. But advocates of simple and uncreative formulas probably won't be effective or, ultimately, helpful.

But then again, of course, there is always the looming threat of failure, of ideals corrupted and smarminess rewarded.

I love how all the greedy capitalist pig fucks are just skeeting all over themselves cause Castro admitted that the changes to the Cuban economy are necessary. Wow, pat yourselves on the back America you beat down a little island nation so much that it finally capitulated to your demands that it prostrate itself for the sake of your profit. Good job you fucking pieces of shit. Viva La Cuba! Viva La Revolution!

um.. actually, the Cuban model works fine, the state controls well over 90% of the economy (no scams or fraud, great consumer protection), paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing (it's perfect!) at least a portion of every citizen's food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices too (no one goes hungry and no corporations abuse them)

The Cuban model is one of the few that are really based on improving people's lives and I hope Castro doesn't get corrupted by America in to thinking it doesn't.

That was an amazing visit with Castro.
One has to give him credit for still learning, and for publicly admitting mistakes.
I'm no fan of repressive one party governments, but regardless of the darker times fighting a revolution, and trying to maintain it in opposition to massive and fierce entrenched US and establishment Cuban interests, he has very consistently shown that his concern has been for the people.
And, as I said in my own post of this article, he's still a charmer.

I am curious about the interpretation of conservative business magazines like Forbes that assigns Castro a staggering amount of personal wealth.
Fidel was the son of a rich man in a patriarchal culture (illegitimate, I think) and an obsessive hands-on personality as well.
I'm curious (having known a few US entrepreneurs of similar personality) if he felt he had to control a big hunk of things (practically everything) himself, or if the designation of massive "personal" wealth to him is essentially wrong. I guess, at his age, that question will be resolved soon.

US congressmen had plans to make Cuba a US territory long before the Spanish-American war. After, the Spanish-American war it was a very common assumption by many in the US government. I can see why Castro would still want to keep US investment at arm's length even if he has learned to encourage small business and investment from the rest of the world.
My brother (a staunch capitalist) and his family were there several years ago and had nice things to say about Cuba. I'd look forward to seeing Cuba myself soon. Great music and good people, I understand.

Sometimes the last guy to arrive at the party tells the funniest jokes. Castro has been the life of the party (actually many parties, both political and otherwise) quite often in the past. I certainly hope that he can be the catalyst of some sort of change. If it happens, I'll book tickets to Cuba almost immediately.

Early developmental activities are the easiest and most profitable. The job of setting up basic modern infrastructure will be enormous but not terribly challenging from a technical or financial point of view. Low hanging fruit.

The job of getting it "right" might be harder. Developing economies are also the ugliest, dirtiest most corrupt countries on the planet. Avoiding that will be a tremendous challenge. But China is a great example (of what to do and, quite often, what NOT to do).

A stunning opportunity, I would think. The chance to build a developing economy in the 21st century with the knowledge of how Asian development occurred in the 20th.

Cuba could be a puzzle that comes with instructions.